The big day is coming up! You’re probably in a flurry of wedding plans—picking out the cake, tailoring the dress, shopping for caterers and photographers. You’re probably taking good care of your body so you’ll look amazing in your dress, but are you giving the same care and attention to your skin? While your wedding is one of the most exciting days of your life, planning for it can be super stressful! We all know what stress can do to our complexions (hello breakouts!), so your skin needs plenty of extra TLC during this crazy (and amazing!) time. We created this blog post to highlight a few adjustments in your skincare routine that you’ll want to make 4-6 months prior to your wedding to make sure that your skin is glowing and beautiful on your big day! Here Are Our Top Wedding Skin Care Tips: See a professional to get a lineup of stellar products suited to your skin. The ladies at the mall and Target don’t REALLY know what you and your skin need. Make sure to seek out professional advice before you splurge on products. Talk to a licensed esthetician at a reputable spa (Portland peeps, we’ve got you covered!) who can take a good look at your skin and make knowledgeable recommendations. A good esthetician can hook you up with products that work for your unique skin type, climate, and body chemistry. Why buy crappy over-the-counter stuff when you could buy products perfectly tailored to your skin? Cleanse your face daily. No shortcuts here! Stay away from those over-the-counter cleansing wipes. Clean your face...

Hello there Portland beauties! It’s Winter and if you haven’t noticed, it’s COLD out (yep, even here in Portland!) And with this cold comes dry skin. Here are some of my recommendations: Drink water infused with cucumber- Cucumber is fabulous for your skin because it contains silica, which boosts moisture and elasticity. I’m not the biggest fan of chomping on cucumbers, but I DO love infusing my water with them. Pour yourself a pitcher of filtered water, toss about 5 slices of cucumber in and let them soak for 15 minutes or more and then drink throughout the day. I think you’ll find that you will end up drinking even more water because it tastes even yummier than plain old water. Quickly tone the skin with a PH balanced toner after getting our of the shower: After you take a bath or shower and the room is all hot and steamy, quickly tone your skin with a ph balanced toner that is free of drying agents such as alcohol. It will help to moderate oil production and prep the skin for your moisture cream. Wanna learn more about facial toner? Read a blog we wrote on it here. Use a water-based moisture cream followed by an hydrating oil or balm- While you might be tempted to combat your dry skin with a lovely facial oil, it won’t be as hydrating as applying a water-based moisture cream first! Why? Well our skin and our body is mostly comprised of water and water molecules can penetrate more deeply into our skin than oil. Thus, fist applying a water-based moisture cream and...

When I first became an esthetician I struggled majorly with sales. I would give a facial and have clients straight up ask me what they should use for their particular skin strengths and struggles. At the time, I didn’t want to seem pushy, so I would send them to others to buy products that I liked and recommended. Not only was this a silly business move, it was a pretty silly professional move. Clients came to me to (as a professional) to make their skin better. Part of that was a regular facial routine, but an EVEN BIGGER part of it was a regular at-home care routine. Now that I’ve been “doing skin” for almost a decade, I relish the opportunity to help match clients with products that will help them get the results they are looking for. After all, who else takes at least an hour to touch and look at your skin with the sole purpose of helping to improve your skin? Even your dermatologist doesn’t put that kind of time in with you! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: I would say that the number one thing that makes me giggle is when a client tells me about all their skin woes, how committed they are to see a change, but that “they need to use up their old stuff first” (you know…before buying the stuff that will ACTUALLY improve their condition). Here’s the thing: if you LIKE what you use and it’s working, then “it ain’t broke”. Keep using it! But if you are using something that isn’t working for your skin, then...

My staff and I at The Portland Girl are experts in the art of skincare. We can melt your tensions, extract your blackheads and leave your skin feeling smooth like a baby’s bottom. But being experts in skincare means that we also spend a good deal of time, thought and effort deciding what products we think would be best for your particular skin. Because what you use at home EVERY day…is even more important than getting regular facials. It’s extremely frustrating to try to help clients improve their skin when they only come in once a month for a facial and then don’t take care of their skin the other 29 days of the month. It’s like someone going to personal training once a month and then ignoring their eating and working out for the rest of the month, but then expecting to see miraculous results. It’s silly! Which brings me back to toner… I’ve worked in skincare for over 8 years and I must say that selling toner has been the biggest uphill battle. Moisture cream and serum fly off the shelf, but toner…well, not so much! That is, until I learned to explain it in terms that my clients understood. Yes- toner can help to reset the PH balance of your skin (which is slightly acidic at 5.5) post cleansing, but what does that REALLY mean for you? PH Wha?? Well let’s start with a basic explanation of PH levels. PH actually means “potential hydrogen” and it describes the acid-alkaline ratio of a substance that ranges from 0 (most acidic) to 14...

All of us at The Portland Girl spend a ton of time removing bikini hair (I know, crazy job, right?!) We get a variety of hair and skin types into the studio for sugaring hair removal services and what we have found is that some people struggle with ingrown hairs and some people don’t. We would like to say that there is an easy answer to why this divide exists, but there isn’t one. There are many factors that impact your likelihood for ingrown hairs such as: Lifestyle. (do you sweat a lot? bike a lot?…this can increase your chances of getting ingrown hairs) Hair texture. Do you have super fine hair? Sometimes super fine hair has a more difficult time working its way out of the follicle and into sight, thus getting trapped and unhappy beneath the skins surface. Hair follicle structure. Are your follicles super slanted to the point that your hair grows in at a very lateral angle (instead of straight up and out)? This can make it easy get trapped hairs that weren’t able to peek up! Result? Ingrown hairs! Waxing. Have you been getting waxed instead of sugared? Waxing pulls hair out AGAINST the direction of hair growth while sugaring pulls out WITH the direction of hair growth. Anytime you are pulling hairs out against the natural grain, you are likely going to experience more hair breakage. Breakage can lead to tiny hairs (that snapped off) getting covered up by our dead skin and thus getting unhappy and inflamed. So as you can see. There are MANY factors that can impact the likelihood of having...

I see a lot of facial clients who come to me to help them clear up their adult acne. They all exclaim that “They had great skin growing up! What did they do to deserve bad skin now?” While I can’t speak to their potential karmic debts, I can speak to the fact that adult acne happens sometimes and it’s actually not as uncommon as you might think! What causes adult acne? Adult acne can often be attributed to hormonal changes (going off birth control, heading into menopause, having a baby, etc). There are a LOT of things from 30+ that affect our hormones and when this happens, our skin often the first organ to complain. And thus the breakouts begin. Why do hormones affect our skin and cause acne? Some people assume that high estrogen causes acne, but in truth, it allows DHT to increase. DHT is an androgenic hormone that causes acne and oily skin in women especially. Having excessively high estrogen reduces progesterone which is in charge of keeping DHT “in check”. When it’s not in check, it can go a little crazy (my words, not science). Are there other reasons for adult acne? There sure are! Did you ever used to break out when you were young and the sales clerk at Walgreens would point out that you just needed to drink more water and quit eating candy? No? Well they used to give me unsolicited advice about my acne all the time (p.s. NO ONE WANTS YOUR UNSOLICITED ADVICE ABOUT THEIR ACNE!) While I didn’t want their advice, it wasn’t exactly bad advice. Over-indulging...